Defense against bio terror

[Sarevok]

Stuarts posts in the thread on future tech got me to ask this question. It seems advances in science is making creating new weaponized diseases easier and easier. The risk that biological weapons could become a doomsday scenario is becoming real. There is some chance of a country surviving a nuclear weapon attack with luck and correct defenses and preparation. But a deadly super germ is all but unstoppable as it overwhelms the world. However would the same advances in biotech also make it easier to counter diseases quickly and effectively ? For instance if a super influenza was developed could a countermeasure be developed and deployed quickly before significant numbers of humans are dead ? I really hope there is at least one bright spark of hope as the flipside to the power to maim a large percentage of humanity.

[Forum Troll]

A doomsday bug wiping out everybody depends on spreading for weeks or months symptom-free and undetected, only activating and killing off its transmitting hosts after a delay. So you take a sample of random people worldwide and rush to a lab daily. Use your future tech to analyze every last bit of DNA, RNA, whatever in the samples. If you find an unrecognized, uncataloged unusual result, a genetically engineered super-pathogen lying dormant, then it's red alert.

Besides, colonize deep space so some people are months away.

And if you die out, eventually your robots live on.

[Mr Bean]

1. Live Isolated.. Like move in with the Palins... except they have kids, so live in a shack somewhere in Alaska in one of the towns that has to have everything flown in once every two months.
......

3. Profit!
Seriously a deliberate bio-attack by intelligent enemies is not going to be stopped and the chances of infection from your environment increase every year as we build faster and better transportation. The Peak Oil Senario is our best defense as that reduces people to living locally for the most part and thus massive increases our chances of surviving a bio attack or rather, putting one coast or the other in lock-down before the disease spreads.

[Sea Skimmer]

Technology has improved our ability to defend against biowarfare a fair bit. The only true means of defence is early detection of the bioagent, to allow for quarantine. Preventing dispersal or production is essentially impossible, and even if we can come up with a quick cure, that wont do much good if the disease has already spread to millions of people. You just can’t produce vaccines all that quickly.

For a long time the only way to do detection was manual laboratory tests which could take quite some time, at least a working day between going out and collecting samples, brining them to a lab to final results. Now we have mobile labs which can be deployed to sensitive areas, and we are currently perfecting a completely unmanned bioagent sensor platform which runs tests for dozens of bio agents using air samples each hour. The plan is to deploy them to airports, stadiums and other areas likely to be targeted for release of bioagents. That way not only do we get a basic early warning system, we also get a semblance of a mechanism to track the spread of an airborne agent. I don’t know specifics, but I’m sure similar devices are being developed for water supplies, abet water dispersal is not really that huge a threat unless someone digs into a pipeline downstream of the water treatment plants.

However as long as we live in open societies (I’d imagine North Korea has little to fear from mass spread of biowarfare for example) we are going to be vulnerable.

[Samuel]

Totalitarian police state would do the trick.

[loomer]

For personal use, it's quite easy to rig up a mobile home with a positive air pressure system to prevent anything getting in, drive it into the middle of nowhere with enough supplies to last you a few months (including a lot of fuel for a genny or an alternative means of power. Maybe a few solar rigs. A farm with a wind power turbine, that sort of deal, could actually be ideal. You show up before the plague hits the area, negotiate with the farmer to give you access to power in exchange for sheltering them/cash/whatever.)

Then you just wait the thing out before moving to a sterilized zone. And there will be sterilized zones. Once every living thing in an area dies of this plague, it'll only be able to survive for a limited time period - in the case of, say, airborne ebola, hours or days. It could be months - hence the supplies.

Even if the disease is like anthrax spores and can survive decades, you can bet your sweet ass that remaining government forces will have sterilized key areas as a matter of practice. Soldiers in MOPP gear and technicians in moonsuits going around with a tanker truck full of bleach and a high pressure hose, etc. If nothing else, locations of national defense importance like the American pentagon would be decontaminated quickly - even if just temporarily, to get classified information to a secured area or destroy it.

Other personal suggestions include purchasing all over white 'bunny' suits (you know the ones. Medical testers, lab techs, whatever wear them in films and from time to time in reality. The one piece white cloth suits with only the face and hands exposed.) When wearing it outside the clean zone, make sure you tape up the legs and arms, wear impermeable boots (and depending on the cloth, an impermeable covering. Even a rain slicker can help), and a gas mask.

Buy a decent, military grade gasmask and a good stock of filters (some US army filters are rated for a full month's operation, but even then you want at least six, to guarantee a minimum of two months operation even with things going to hell quickly. You'd keep them in different locations, but all logical - one in your carry bag with the gasmask, one in the glove box, a couple in your bug out bag, that sort of deal. At least that way if you can't get home to pick up your shit because of initial plague strikes or riots you have two months supply, unless you're cut off from your car and workplace as well.)

Keep long-life broad spectrum antibiotics, at least six months supply, and anti-viral drugs such as interferon with a broad spectrum. Begin use of them as soon as the attacks start - there's evidence that against bacterial based infections of a severe nature (and viral, but with the anti-viral meds) can be prevented or at least reduced to lower lethality by immediate ingestion of appropriate medication before confirmed infection or even known symptoms. Basically, if it gets into your body, you'll be killing it early - maybe even early enough that, while generally a superbug immune to treatment, you'll shrug it off and acquire a natural resistance.

Food stocks are a must, and should be dried, canned, or otherwise long lasting. They must be hermetically sealed. Again, canned food is ideal. Intact plastic bagged food is also good, as are MREs stored in airtight containers for an extra layer of security (though they will generally be safe.)

Always plan to have a buddy with you during a biological crisis. You can't effectively decon yourself, and while emergency measures are possible, there's still a significant danger as opposed to having a suited buddy do it for you. Moral support is also valuable, as is someone to laugh with when the power goes out (it will if you stay reliant on the grid during such a crisis - the support staff for power stations, in a full biological cataclysm, will die.), and even if you have alternative power and can keep watching your DVDs, how long is watching the Simpsons alone going to last you before you begin to go mad? No, you need company - but only a few people. Too many is a drain on resources.

Never forget to completely sterilize any materials scavenged from outside the clean zone with heat, steam, or chemical mixtures. Always double sterilize using two different measures, when available. (scavenge only when needed. When scavenging for food, choose only products in hermetically sealed containers and carefully inspect them outside your personal clean zone before bringing them in. Decon them with a bleach mix on the outside of the containers.)

Maintain a supply of silver filters for water supplies, and practice, for a week when you have a week off, going without water as much as possible. Sponge bath to maintain moderate cleanliness an d the body's natural health, keep up adequate water, but see how little you can use otherwise without allowing filthy (relatively clean, like used only for bread/cheese/fruits and then cleaned with a damp cloth are acceptable to not recieve a wash.) dishes to pile up. When washing them, use as little water as possible - your food will taste like soap, but if it gets you another three days from your existing water supplies, it's worth it.

If scavenging water, select water only in sealed bottles.

Ideally, maintain some silverware. It's one extra layer of defence against infection by consumption of tainted foods if it's real silver. Just a knife and fork can help.

Keep a full, general purpose medical kit. You never know what might happen. Learn to do without painkillers for the majority of ailments, like headaches - in the event of a catastrophe, you'll need them for more serious things.

Wean yourself off of luxury goods.

The list goes on, but following the above will give you a higher chance of survival. It's difficult to say exactly how much, but it'll very likely make a difference.

[Zor]

In an open enviroment without humans and with other Microbes to prey upon them, how long do bio-warfare microbes last?

Zor

[loomer]

All depends on the specific virus or bacteria used. Weaponized anthrax lasts a good long while (I believe the Russian requirement was two weeks), but anthrax is of course, crazy durable. Even with other microbes present to fuck with it you can get viable spores decades old. The record is seventy odd years, I think.

I'd be fairly certain that most such weapons wouldn't be particularly long lived after killing everything in an area. Hours, certainly. Perhaps days. Generally speaking, lifetime in deployment wasn't the most important factor for bioweapon development. You wanted lifetime pre-deployment in storage, infection means, durability, virulence and potency. The enemy will generally be able to respond within the first hour of an attack with full MOPP or equivalent gear, meaning that the primary focus is on maximum initial saturation. Long lifespan in deployment is just a bonus.

There are theoretical time limits of up to a week for some preparations, but generally speaking, expected life span should be no more than two or three days for anything BUT anthrax. Unfortunately anthrax is amongst the most likely bioweapons to be used precisely because of length of effect, ease of manufacture, storage and deployment, high lethality and targeted nature.

The worst prospect would be some kind of severe hyperflu with the durability of anthrax, but there's no evidence whatsoever of such a disease, let alone a weaponized variant. Following the drop in viability of the weapon itself, however, is the issue of natural decay - if one person had typhoid when they died, you have a problem. The bodies themselves do not create disease, but they certainly don't help matters. If a rat eats the corpse, it may contract the disease - or whatever agent was used in the attack. If it is then eaten by other animals (or not, it doesn't really matter. But a cat or dog that eats one and then runs home is a very alarming prospect), you can have carriers spreading the agent far longer than its natural lifespan would allow.


The suggestion for a month or more of supply isn't to wait out the actual biological attack. It's to let the infection burn out or be eliminated and the (potentially) resistant survivors bring riots down and restore partial order, and when you rejoin society you'll benefit from herd immunity.

[K. A. Pital]

Having a comprehensive civil defense system and controlled city blocks as opposed to the free sprawl of the US helps, as does having easily controlled, single traffic lines. For example Russia relies on long-range railroad and road "line" of the Transsiberian to connect all major cities - controlling the traffic there is easier than on the US interstate where millions of people move in all directions all the time.

The key issue is the lethality of biological weapons - superlethality and short incubation period will just take time and isolation of the outbreak to do the trick (most incubator hosts will be dead before the disease spreads, superlethal agents are bad if you want to cause a pandemia). Less lethal, but long-incubation period agents are far superior, superlethality won't be naturally constaining the spread of the agent.

In any case, having sealed biological laboratories and detectors stuck in major transport hubs like city train, bus and airport stations, are good measures for now.

The future development of technology might produce yet better countermeasures, like portable multi-detectors, but as of now they don't really exist in a meaningful form.

[Ariphaos]

I'm still of the view that he best defense is going to be genetic engineering, widespread synthesis capability and extensive distributed computing.

[Forum Troll]

Weaponized anthrax lasts a good long while (I believe the Russian requirement was two weeks), but anthrax is of course, crazy durable. Even with other microbes present to fuck with it you can get viable spores decades old. The record is seventy odd years, I think.

Even if some anthrax spores survive for that long, their remaining concentration and the rate of exposure got to drop relatively low and be less of a disaster after the initial years though. Anthrax, after all, is a disease known throughout recorded history, easily found in dirt in many places, and still infecting some animals and farm workers each year. It is the mass dispersal of a biowarfare attack that is an important part of it being particularly bad.

In that way, anthrax is not as bad as smallpox, as, while either may be deadly in a mass military attack, smallpox is more known for epidemics spreading to countless people from a single source (like potentially a small-scale terrorist operation).

I'd be fairly certain that most such weapons wouldn't be particularly long lived after killing everything in an area. Hours, certainly. Perhaps days. Generally speaking, lifetime in deployment wasn't the most important factor for bioweapon development.

Makes sense. UV of sunlight killing some stuff eventually if outside on an exposed surface, et cetera.

For a long time the only way to do detection was manual laboratory tests which could take quite some time, at least a working day between going out and collecting samples, brining them to a lab to final results. Now we have mobile labs which can be deployed to sensitive areas, and we are currently perfecting a completely unmanned bioagent sensor platform which runs tests for dozens of bio agents using air samples each hour. The plan is to deploy them to airports, stadiums and other areas likely to be targeted for release of bioagents.

Speculating, probably the more portable sensor platforms are going to be tuned to specific known agents, like your example of "dozens" but not an unlimited number, so it might be possible for an entirely new pathogen to bypass detection, if such could be created. (You'd need a very, very sophisticated bigger lab perhaps to analyze and ID every last type of microbe or virus in a sample). On the other hand, Iraq and other moderately recent bioweapons programs seem to have been still based on various strains of pre-existing diseases like anthrax and smallpox, apparently still finding it too challenging to genetically engineer entirely new types of custom pathogens. Certainly a distributed sensor network is a great idea.

Technology has improved our ability to defend against biowarfare a fair bit. The only true means of defence is early detection of the bioagent, to allow for quarantine. Preventing dispersal or production is essentially impossible, and even if we can come up with a quick cure, that wont do much good if the disease has already spread to millions of people. You just can’t produce vaccines all that quickly.

You could rephrase that, though.

You can't produce vaccines all that quickly with current technology unless your intelligence agencies can find out or guess in advance what you may be facing. Example: The U.S. stockpiled millions of doses of Anthrax vaccine in advance of the second Iraq war, as it was a known enemy agent, not committing so much funding to be enough for absolutely everybody but still a lot.

If bioattack got viewed as perhaps the top threat (especially if there was extra future public concern due to some past attack eventually), you might commit the money to stockpiling enough vaccines against anthrax, smallpox, and other top agents to treat the entire population if needed. Part of it got to be how much money are you willing to put into that, stockpiling NBC suits, positive-pressure facilities, into the CDC, and more.

Of course, the other side's researchers are going to be trying to make their pathogens immune to existing antibiotics and vaccines if they can, the perpetual defense versus offense struggle in any form of warfare.

On the news today:

Scientists close in on 'universal' vaccine for flu: study

Scientists on Sunday unveiled lab-made human antibodies that can disable several types of influenza, including highly-lethal H5N1 bird flu and the "Spanish Flu" strain that killed tens of millions in 1918.

Tested in mice, the antibodies work by binding to a previously obscure structure in the flu virus which, when blocked, sabotages the pathogen's ability to enter the cell it is trying to infect, according to the study.

Because this structure -- described by one scientist as a "viral Achilles' heel" -- is genetically stable and has resisted mutation over time, the antibodies are effective against many different strains.

The breakthrough "holds considerable promise for further development into a medical tool to treat and prevent seasonal as well as pandemic influenza," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped fund the study.

Clinical trials on humans could begin within a couple of years, the researchers said.

Seasonal flu kills more than 250,000 people every year, and pandemic flu, which occurs with the emergence of deadly viral strains against which people lack immunity, remains an ever-present threat.

Vaccines have long been the first line of defense against flu, but even seasonal viruses evolve so rapidly that the vaccines need to be updated every year. Even then, they are not always effective.

A team led by Wayne Marasco, a professor at Harvard Medical School, began the study by scanning tens of billions of so-called monoclonal antibodies in the laboratory.

Rest of story over here.

I'm still of the view that he best defense is going to be genetic engineering, widespread synthesis capability and extensive distributed computing.

If future technology could drop the time for finding a suitable antibody against a new target pathogen, mass-producing, and distributing it from months or years to become merely weeks, days, or less, that indeed could help. While beyond current tech, there's nothing in the laws of physics precluding it, up to the extremes possible in an AI / nanotech era (though that tech level would lead to its own new threats in turn, the usual cycle).